“My care and my mission in the world is to have a healthy baby as well as a healthy mother.”

Anne Margolis

Anne Margolis is a Licensed Certified Nurse Midwife, OB/GYN Nurse Practitioner, Certified Yoga Teacher, and Clarity Breathwork Practitioner. Through her online childbirth course ‘Love Your Birth’, her online and in-person midwifery for pregnancy and postpartum support consultations, her birth professional mentoring, and her holistic gynecology offerings she infuses wisdom, compassion, inspiration, and joy into the entire process of women’s wellness from mama-hood to menopause.

On this episode, she recounts her experiences while going through a traumatic situation while giving birth. And this happened to her TWICE! She raises awareness to the birthing world on what a healthy delivery is – and that is to have a healthy baby and a healthy mother as well. Join us in this conversation where she talks about how to deal with birth trauma, how to reduce risk in birthing, and how to get yourself holistic healing.

Dr. Veronica: Okay, welcome again to the Wellness Revolution Podcast. Today we’re going to talk about our birth, our own birth and the trauma that surrounds it and yes you know that birth although we color it as this beautiful wonderful thing and yes it is when a new life comes in the world. The trauma surrounding birth it’s painful, it’s work, there’s been a lot going on. Sometimes things happen before we’re born that can be traumatic. Do you understand that we know and hear and feel what’s going on while we were in our mother’s body?

So let me just give a little background about this, I have a lady on we’re going to talk all about this birth trauma and as I like pull her stuff up I was just looking, want to talk a little bit about my birth trauma. But I’m going on Anne Margolis and I hope I spell Margolis right, homesweethomebirth.com, homesweethomebirth.com. No you don’t have to have a home birth, there’s other ways that you can do it, but let me just say that when did I experienced my own birth and I don’t necessarily say it’s a trauma. So we use the term reborn and things like that.

Once I had a past life regression and part of the past life regression was going back and back and back into your previous history into your childhood and even back into your mother’s womb and I remember that interesting experience because I’m in there, I’m in bathed in the water I’m looking around and mostly comfortable but I can remember times where I could definitely tell you that my mother was unhappy. It wasn’t that she wasn’t happy that she was having a baby it’s just her whole life she was questioning at that point in time.

I found out later on from my mother. Actually before I went back to this I remember my mother saying to me, you know my parents are now divorced and have been divorced for a lot of years. My mother said to me one time, you know he wasn’t acting right even back before you were born. About my father and now let me just say my father is, if you want to say not acting right we’re not talking about somebody who was a drunk or a drug addict or you know any of those type of things. An abuse or any of those type of really just horrible reprehensible things that people deal with.

My father I would call him kind of neurotic, a little bit he suffered from depression and he’s just a little weird, he’s a geek and he was an electrical engineer really into organs and classical music, was the chairman at one time Itripoli and he was just into himself and that stuff, computers and engineering stuff. So this is kind of what it is, so he was a little bit emotionally detached I would say and now knowing him more emotionally I would call it kind of immature from a social perspective.

So my mother was dealing with that because she’s married to this man, she has one child I’m in the womb and she was feeling uncomfortable with the situation enough to at a point said to me, hey he wasn’t acting right back then. So guess what when my mother’s upset that’s traumatic to me in her womb, when I come out you see things in your home. But this is not the typical trauma that we talk about but yet it’s something that because I can even tell you about it and remember and hold back on in on the moment that my mother told me about this relationship with my father, this is obviously something significant and I remember going into a regression before I was born. And seeing my mother unhappy in that situation and I knew though it was not about the still traumatic to see your mother unhappy.

So I want to bring on Anne Margolis because she does all this cool goddess birthing stuff and she’s a licensed certified midwife, OBGYN practitioner, yoga all the other good stuff and we’re going to talk about what’s called clarity breath work. But we all have birth trauma and there’s women who want to make it, how do I make this as beautiful as possible for me my baby. If you’re listening and you’re past the point where you’re thinking about having a baby, think about this in terms of your own birth and trauma in some situations in your life but also this is something that you may want to recommend to other women who are going to go into childbirth at time. So Anne welcome to the Wellness Revolution.

Anne: Wonderful to be here and let me just clarify. The website is Home Sweet Home Birth but it’s really how can we restore humanity and bring that model of care and celebration to the birthing process empowering women whether they’re birthing at home in the birth center, the hospital or even in the operating room, okay. So it’s not just about, it’s supporting women’s choices but having that restoring humanity and celebration to the process of giving birth.

Dr. Veronica: And I got to say I applaud you to say we’re celebrating women’s choice because we get into these times especially as women where we give very judgmental on how people do their life and so ever people are into, oh I want to do it natural, I want to do it this way, I want to do it that way and it’s like you know what, the goal is to have a healthy baby and however that happens do it that way and don’t get upset about it. You don’t know what’s going to happen surrounding the birth of your child. The best laid plans may not turn out the way you want them to and you may have to go a very different way than you expect it and so we should roll with that. So I’m happy that you didn’t say everybody should have a midwife and a home birth.

Anne: No, no, no but the goal of modern medicine is everyone should have a healthy physical breathing baby who has a heartbeat and the goal of my care and my mission in the world is to have a healthy baby, mind body, heart and soul as well as a healthy mother, mind, body, heart and soul. It’s not just about a healthy baby physically and that when a woman has a traumatic birth experience, everyone deemphasize or doesn’t even account for the significant psychological impact of her experience and they just say, but you had a healthy baby. So they totally invalidates you know her experience and I had my own birth trauma that in a way which made me very passionate about preventing and healing, helping others heal from it in a very effective, using effective modality that I’ll talk about.

Dr. Veronica: Yes that what’s next, I says so you’ve got to tell your story because at least right nicely and to why you do what you do now. So let’s go back to what happened to you.

Anne: So now a lot of women probably listening gave birth around when I gave birth or they gave birth or you know let’s say people are older they gave birth earlier and some gave birth you know later than I did. But still the routine medical model of care around birth can lead to a lot of birth trauma. So I didn’t know this when I was an obstetrics nurse, I graduated from University of Pennsylvania, I was all primed for natural childbirth and the beauty of birth and you know I applied for my first job at you know we had to do med surge nursing before we could do obstetric nursing.

So I was this obstetrics nurse. I was in my twenties you know and that’s when I developed fear of childbirth and because I never saw a normal, birth was a crisis waiting to happen, birth was a medical emergency, it was a disaster waiting to happen and it was beginning to prevent, it was like a potential lawsuit, every woman coming in was a potential lawsuit. So I was not, I was as a nurse having to rescue a lot of the problems because of the standard routine interventions that were done to healthy women coming in to have a baby. So of course you know several years of that you know I wasn’t seeing good outcomes, not everything was good.

I saw a lot of neonatal intensive care admissions, I saw moms and babies dying in childbirth you know and I have a very sensitive heart, I’m taking it in and I was seeing more, I was a nurse at cesarean section and I major operation more than it seemed like I was in a vaginal birth as a nurse, right. So of course when I get pregnant I’m full of fear and fear as we know inner stress is sort of like cause so many of the modern, disease; mentally, physically, psychologically in the world. It’s certainly is one of the enemies of labor and even an animal who is afraid like a deer is trying to have a baby, a cat is trying to have a baby. If a predator you know if a dear is seeing a tiger in the wild, that labor will stop and she will get into the sympathetic nervous system fighter flight and she will run. You know and when she feels safe and away from the tiger then she will have her baby.

Human beings are very similar and the mind body is very connected so what happened to me was I just went in with a lot of fear, I took lamas and I was given the royal treatment. I was a staff on the unit having a baby, right. So everybody meant well but you know the first thing that happens is you put on a hospital gown which disempowers you right away, you think they’re in charge I know nothing you know and I’m sick. It creates a dependency it’s a sub- even in the hospital now I encourage women to wear their own clothes.

But that being said I took off you know I wore a medical, hospital gown, I was not allowed to eat and drink, you try running the New York marathon 26 miles which is kind of like you know the labor is a huge event for- athletic event for the body without food and you know nourishment and fluids. But at least you know they gave me IV fluids, I was strapped to a monitor so that meant I had to stay still in a bed. Now that goes again and I as a midwife I know women when left to their own devices you know instinctually will be up right. Because we need gravity to get the baby down and out and the pelvis is three bones connected by ligaments, so kind of position changes can actually increase the diameter of the pelvis. When you lie down the pelvic diameter is smaller and also it’s more comfortable to be moving and rocking and being upright.

Anyway so just those routine things even in a natural birth already set me up to fail. So the doctor came in I was on a time limit you know, every hour I had to be dilating one centimeter and I wasn’t and the doctor kept coming in without even asking me which is one of the main causes of birth trauma that they equate it with a rape and it needs to be taken as seriously as a rape as I have no control, a man is coming in and sticking his fingers up my vagina and checking me internally which is uncomfortable and then walks out and I heard him kept saying outside the room, she is still four, she is still four, she is still four and at one point I heard him tell my colleague the nurse hang pit.

Now I know what that is, I know that means to Pitocin, not everybody else with known hang pit what that means. She comes in and- Now you have to understand my biggest fear was ending up in the operating room having major abdominal surgery. My biggest fear because I’m a dancer I’m very athletic I do yoga, that was my biggest fear and then the other biggest fear was having a damaged baby, because I’ve seen them. So she said hanged you know she was put in the pit in my IV and I said no, no, no I want that.

She said to me with love, “oh but honey you don’t want a cesarean, do you?” No, you know I’m vulnerable now, right. So she feared me into okay give me the pit, right, I don’t want a cesarean. Well of course the Pitocin made the contractions harder stronger more intense closer together in my lamas, my ability to cope went out the window and then of course came the epidural. Now once I was given the epidural which is a shot in the- you know giving anesthetic around the fluid of the spinal cord, immediately my baby’s heart rate dropped to such a dangerous level they call a state emergency cesarean.

So my biggest fear is happening, there’s this ER scene, people with very frightened eyes and rushing and you know and I was whisked off into the operating room and then I was in the operating room, you know they prepped me and I’m by myself 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour. Nobody was monitoring my baby, nobody was monitoring me, they wouldn’t let my husband in and in that time I was convinced I moved from my baby’s damaged to my baby is dead.

That’s how what it was like lying in the operating room by myself, so this emergency cesarean because my baby had feel- I mean you know bradycardia, a terminal bradycardia- the heart rate went down real low. So the epidural cause me to open and I’m pushing, it is a miracle, right. So I called for help, they were waiting still for the assistant surgeon in a hospital that called for an emergency cesarean where you need to get the baby out in 10 minutes.

So I’m pushing, I’ve to call the doctor help I’m pushing, baby is coming you know and he comes running in, he’s in a panic. He screams for a vacuum which is like a baby hoover where they stick a suction on the baby’s head and he cuts a huge a peace out of me which and he pulls her out. She was pink breathing had a heartbeat, didn’t even need to resuscitate her. They say she’s fine, I was not fine and now I know that the trauma I feel, you know just like we know that drugs, smoking, infections, alcohol, poor nutrition, chronic you know goes to the baby so does the hormones of stress and trauma.

So I did not know I was traumatized and everyone was like- I knew that I didn’t feel right. You know I was having night- you know now I know what is called post-traumatic stress disorder which is a normal reaction to a traumatic event where you’re not in control, where things are happening against your will and you’re afraid of something very serious like a death or damage to you or your loved one, right. I was having nightmares, I was having recurrent memories of it, I was having a heart I loved my baby dearly but she reminded me of it. I think it interfere with my early bonding even though we’re very close and I love her dearly. I avoided any talk of the birth, anyone wanted to talk to me about it, I couldn’t handle it, it triggered panic and so much so that I couldn’t even imagine going back to work. You know when it was time for me to go back to work.

But you know everyone was telling me you have a healthy baby like you know just focus on that. So I tried, I tried to do that but I felt very isolated and alone because the medical community doesn’t know what trauma- like doesn’t associate any psychological effect of birth to that, to birth to women and they don’t know birth trauma. So I didn’t know about birth trauma so I just thought something was the matter with me, why is it just me. I had no one to talk to, anyway I sucked it up and I went back to work, right.

Dr. Veronica: I want to like jump forward a little bit, we can talk for hours because this happened over hours and days. So you have this dramatic experience.

Anne: Twice.

Dr. Veronica: Twice.

Anne: The same thing happened my second baby-

Dr. Veronica: You had that experience twice so we will go into- about the second one. Let’s fast forward, when did the moment come that you said I have to do something about it and I know what to do about this. So give us a little bit of- women the answers- like I’m sitting on the edge I’ve been in OBGYN I’ve delivered babies I’m going back to my own dramatic birth experience. Not mine but one where I had you know one of my songs was you know kind of wild and crazy. I’m sitting on the edge I maybe going to go in the C-section, it turns out it didn’t but cord wrap four times around the neck meant there were issues. So anyway what gave you the idea and then how did this come into action because I want to-

Anne: So a friend of mine I was talking after my second birth and after continuously having to rescue mothers and babies from this sort of treatment, which is very standard that happened to most of us and even worse the generations before, a few generations before when birth was moved to the hospital and taken over by the field of obstetricians and we need obstetricians. But there really are specialized for high risk and complications and diagnosing and treating them medically and surgically. So we need them for the small percentage, right, who do need that kind of care.

I was talking to a friend of mine about my frustrations. She says why do you be a midwife and I’m like what’s a midwife, I really didn’t know. I went to the library, she told me about it we didn’t have internet then, I went to the library I read everything I could about it and I’m like absolutely I apply and it’s a post you know in New York you have to have your bachelor’s in nursing and then you have to have your masters a post-graduate degree and in midwifery school I came home, it was like all of the crisis and complications and surgically and intervention became the exception rather than the norm and I was seeing calm. I was seeing a family celebration; I was seeing the holy, I was seeing that birth is normal that women can birth like they can breathe and babies know how to be born.

So I was seeing women come out empowered and loving their experience even though it was challenging and I really felt I came home to hold this space. But for me to authentically I became very passionate about this is the kind of care I want to give for women so that mothers and babies can have a beautiful birth. A mother is birthing herself each time she birth a new child, the baby is being born. I wanted to create an experience that she will love and cherish forever and not have anything, any kind of you know do my part in preventing birth trauma for either of them and really creating- helping to create an experience of joy and empowerment that she finds her strength and she loves and treasures her experience.

But authentically because of what happened to me, I got pregnant two more times but the first time I said to my midwife for me to authentically promote this for every woman I need to experience it, I’m scared and I don’t think I heal from my trauma. I really don’t I mean it came up even more with my third pregnancy and I had been in midwifery school already, she says, “Oh my gosh, don’t worry this birth is going to be so healing and so different” I didn’t really believe her inside but when I experienced that kind of care and how she held space and encouraged me and everything was done with my consent and she gave me back my power.

Dr. Veronica: Wait, stop. I want to know what is that kind of care, because you’re saying that kind of care-

Anne: The kind of care is treating just like what-

Dr. Veronica: -you don’t know anything about what the perfect experiences like, that’s number one and number two here’s my question and you know I’m sure it pops up in everybody. How do I know that I’m not the person that’s going to be the complication and I’m going to need something bigger deal? How does that get worked out?

Anne: Well you know we don’t know, sometimes we have to you know- But a midwife has expert in normal which is the vast majority of people.

Dr. Veronica: What is the experience?

Anne: Birth is normal until proven otherwise. You know my initial visit with a woman it’s mind, body, heart and soul. My initial visit with a woman is two and a half hours, we build a relationship. Birth and pregnancy are normal until proven otherwise. We give the power back to the woman; nothing is done without her consent. We encourage her to incorporate or you know as a midwife I encourage women to bring pleasure to tap into their power in their life in their pregnancy in their birth and as a woman, right.

Birth is a celebration it’s not a medical event, it always was a celebration in community throughout the world it still is in the majority of countries around the world. So yes we can screen, we can intervene but we don’t anything- it’s first do no harm and Michelle O’Don who is a famous very outspoken world renowned obstetrician. I was at a midwifery conference and he said what is the best intervention that attendant can do at a birth and there are 450 midwives in the room, they all got it wrong. You know anyone who was raising their hand got it wrong and what would you think the answer is?

Dr. Veronica: Nothing.

Anne: Yeah, to knit. To knit, why?. It’s the season calm midwife or doctor who had seen thousands of birth, heart wide open, eyes wide open, ears wide open, can talk to the woman and remind her of her strength and her power and help her calm and help her find her calm and her strength and reassure her and you know give her love but her hands his hands are occupied and she’s exuding calm. So the atmosphere in the room is calm and that- Yes she can put down he can put down the knitting if we need to deal with something and but it’s first do no harm, which is part of the hypocrisy oath that even physicians have to take, right, when they graduate, correct? First do no harm.

Dr. Veronica: Let me ask you a question about this because this is you know the time where people sue when they spill coffee on themselves. So how do we get from the point of you know and here’s what happens what you- When you’re a doctor and in health care- This is my podcast so I can say shit happens, shit just happens and you don’t even know why it happens and just shit happens. So how do you get to the point where shit happens and not all of a sudden, we can make it into a better event and not make it always into a litigious event, because what happens is the why the system is the way it is today because every doctor is covered doing the CYA, OBGYN.

My friends who are OBGYN’s they have $100,000 policies and it’s miserable because you don’t know what’s going to happen who’s going to come in and sue you, though you do the very, it may be bad for trauma nurse and everything like that and there’s horrible stories but it’s like you know what I got to do it this way because this is the standard of care and if I deviate from that standard of care and something goes wrong that’s the end of my life.

Anne: I get it, I get it but I have never been sued, midwives are sued much less. First of all physicians do take on higher risk clients, right. So one of the things is the relationship, you know our visits are an hour we get to know each other very well. When you have a close intimate relationship with someone they’re less likely to sue. Also I’m not intervening; I’m not giving them dangerous drugs that have risks. I’m not you know I’m screening if someone has insulin dependent diabetes; they’re going to be with a doctor, right. But the vast majority of women are healthy, right.

So shit happens Meconium we say happens, midwives have a thing you know a tech Meconium happens, but I don’t wait till it’s a crisis and my transfer rate to an obstetrician is 7%. That means 93% of women are doing it. Okay there are times when let’s say if a woman has a thyroid disorder, right. I will collaborate with a specialist but she can still have midwifery care. If she has dangerous high blood pressure she’s going to be with an obstetrician, right.

So obstetricians are getting a higher you know that’s their expertise we need to work as a team. But the high risk care giving everybody medication and you know drugs and the way that women are being you know monitored, being put on their back not able to eat and drink on an IV. It creates risk and it creates problems. You know a much more risk of having a cesarean and not progressing in labor just by that, right. So cesarean is major abdominal surgery, they’re doing so many other surgeries, laparoscopically to reduce the risk of major abdominal surgery.

So women in midwifery care, if I have to intervene first I’m going to use natural remedies and sometimes it might be you know what let’s take a walk, you know what let’s dance, let’s take a rest. You didn’t eat for a while let’s go eat something. You know so some of the interventions you know we might suggest are very simple non-medical right.

If I have to use medical intervention I do but it’s the exception. I am telling you I have been thousands of babies over two decades of practicing this way and I’m not the only one, like my colleagues we our malpractice insurance is not even a quarter of what obstetricians are having to pay, because midwives have a much less chance of being sued.

Dr. Veronica: Okay now let me ask you a question, because you say I’m spending an hour with a patient, two and a half hours and that’s the way you create a therapeutic encounter.

Anne: I’m assessing, I’m assessing.

Dr. Veronica: Wait; let’s be honest about the way health care works today. Most people do not get compensated, most practitioners do not get compensated well enough to be able to spin on the amount of time and then most people say I’m not going to be able afford XYZ or ABC. So how do you deal with that financial peace?

Anne: Until, well I voted for ObamaCare, but until ObamaCare insurance was paying us well for that whole-

Dr. Veronica: You said until, so does that mean something changed?

Anne: Yeah like the insurance across the board paying me and my colleagues in all medical fields like less than a third or a quarter than what we used to pay, so most of us had to switch. Before I could take Medicaid, Medicaid HMO’s were paying $6,000 per woman for you know the nine months of prenatal labor delivery and then eight weeks, six weeks of postpartum. Private insurance was paying 10 to $12,000. Now I have, I know high risk obstetrician- My sister for example is a high risk, right, so she sees an obstetrician at Cornell.

Her obstetrician even before ObamaCare was saying it’s $20,000, if you need a section it’s $25,000 I don’t take insurance. Doctors in order to stay afloat and midwives in order to stay afloat and you know my father retired after ObamaCare, he just couldn’t do, he couldn’t take you know seven to $30 for office visit.

Dr. Veronica: This is why I’m doing what I’m doing now because when I voted for Obama I understood that I was voting against my own interests if I wanted to take care as many people as possible under insurance, it’s just as not financially feasible to run a business and do it under insurance. It just over work from a financial perspective and I know most patients, clients, people do not understand the business aspect to what’s going on, but if I take less than what I’m spending to take care of people I’m spending money and I’m not even taking home any salary. That gets a little bit old especially after working 100 hours-

Anne: Our health care system is broken.

Dr. Veronica: It is broken and I don’t care whether it’s ObamaCare or whoever comes, they need to figure out how to do this but on the other side; I can tell you that people who figure out how to invest in their health get results. Because they have decided that they’re going to fully play out and participate and then they research and before they even meet me they have decided I’m the right person, so it’s a different kind of relationship other than the person that said, why did I pick you, I pick you just because you’re on my insurance.

Anna: Right and so that people who are coming, that’s the people who come to me and even people on Medicaid they work it out and I’ll give them you know I’ll lower my fee you know for people who really can’t pay. But now the people in the middle income bracket can’t even afford, their insurance premiums went up and they’re not even being covered, it doesn’t cover-

Dr. Veronica: It doesn’t cover the- are crazy now because people call it the Affordable Care Act, but I’m not quite sure who it is affordable to.

Anne: The rich.

Dr. Veronica: Because the people in the middle it’s only affordable to very high paid. Everybody I know who’s an entrepreneur is like you know figure- and like last year or two years ago I said I’m opting out and I ended up with another plan, liberty health care which I believe covers this type of stuff but it was just like I’m not going to pay all that money and then have $13,000 of deductible still and then you’re not covering anything that I don’t-

Anne: No and it takes you a year to get paid, two years to get paid, yeah. So but I have found that people who want this kind of care and don’t want to be treated like you know just like a conveyor belt sort of dehumanized, depersonalizing, seeing a different doctor every you know clinic care five minutes visit, nobody is answering their questions or listening to them, they want this kind of care. People will pay to have a wedding; people will pay to had something that they want, right. They will work it out.

Dr. Veronica: I’m clapping because people you said pay for a wedding and people pay $6,000 go to Disneyland and so this is people have to retool what they feel is important, what’s valuable, you pay for what you value and you value for what you pay for. So when people can come up with 30 to $60,000 to walked down an isle for a day, will be able to invest in somebody who’s going to help you have a birth experience that is pleasant and a healthy baby so that you don’t have a problem for ever more.

Anne: And you know what, and I have seen such kindness. Like I’ll put out a group email to all the ladies in my practice and I’ll say there’s a woman that really wants to have this kind of care, she has no money and I have raised people, I don’t even care if it’s $25. I have gotten money to support another woman having this kind of experience. That’s how passionate people are about it when they have that experience; they want to give back, right.

So I became passionate about it and that’s my mission in the world that I now has gone global. You know but I want to give some hope to the women and babies because some of us have you know like just the standard care for example. Let’s say a baby is in the womb, I mean now there’s tons of research, of medical research in neurology, embryology, psychology that document that babies have nonverbal conscious memory in the womb, right.

Dr. Veronica: I will talk about my birth experience, so.

Anne: Right and just think, so a woman coming- so for the baby who is like getting 24 hour womb service, right, heart to heart with mom is now being given drugs to make the baby come out you know harder stronger, narcotics there’re anesthetic. You know sometimes they put an internal scalp electrode on the baby to monitor the heartbeat. So there’s intervention they stick you know they break the water with a hook. Sometimes babies are pulled out by vacuum or forceps and you know bright light rushed, the medical community is not acting as if the baby’s conscious but the baby is a fully exquisitely conscious human being that is developing non-verbal memories.

The cord is cut right away which is severing a third of the baby’s blood supply which is really the equivalent of a hemorrhage, the baby is being suction they’re sticking tubes down the baby, put in an isolate away from the mom working on that baby doing procedures so that you know if the baby goes to the nicu that intensive care, that’s a whole other thing, right. So people carry non-verbal memories and that impacts us.

But the good news is we don’t have to go to years of psychoanalysis and we don’t have to take medication to heal from trauma and I’ve had you know childhood abuse, I entered adulthood you know from years of childhood abuse from a mentally ill mother and I had a lot of different hits as an adult that- you know my father was in a car accident died very quickly. So I had a lot of hits as an adult and I knew I was carrying trapped emotional pain and trauma in my body. I tried everything, I went to every-

Dr. Veronica: We got to like move on because-

Anne: Well I’m going to tell people that- oh okay. Well so anyway I tried everything and trapped emotional pain and trauma, that new evidence you know the research on trauma healing is through the body not through talk, not through mind and what saved my life is what is called clarity breath work and saved my life. It cleared my body of all the trapped trauma energy, it was like taking off three million pounds of tones of bricks that I’ve been carrying for my whole life and I became so passionate about that, is that I incorporate that now into my practice and it miraculous, I mean all of the work. So people you can look up online there are breath workers all over the place. I do it on Skype but my website homesweethomebirth.com/claritybreathwork. I think it’s on my website to learn more.

Dr. Veronica: The website is homesweethomebirth.com.

Anne: Yes.

Dr. Veronica: You can find them, where to find-

Anne: Where to find clarity breathe work and what’s amazing is that whole-

Dr. Veronica: Let me just ask one thing, we need to get this clear because people are going to see this they’re all over the place and people think birth I need somebody who’s near me, you’re not going to be near everybody. So I want to know in a snippet a very short snippet how you can help people who are not physically near you.

Anne: So you can go on the claritybreathwork.com website to locate other breath work practitioners, there’s the- let me just see if there’s an internet. Let me just look this up real quickly, I’ll give it in the link to you. There’s rebirthing happening all over the world, it’s in Europe in some of the countries as common as yoga studios. There are rebirthing breath work studios where people breathe in groups.

There are several holistic psychiatrists in New York City that recommend it to their clients in an adjunct to what to what they’re doing and so I’m you know doing home visits, I’m now coming to the city and seeing people but you know doing this kind of work. So I travel but like people in California or you know it’s in Canada, it’s in Europe, there are breath workers and you know you can look up rebirthing. If you give me a minute I will look up the organization that also, yeah I think it’s a rebirthing international- Rebirthing Breath work International. So it’s rebirthingbreathwork.com, International Breath work Foundation, so IBFnetwork.com has a list of breath workers around the world and also talks about the science of it.

Dr. Veronica: Wonderful beautiful, it’s just you want to make sure that people they say well oh my God she’s in New York City and I’m not near New York City what do I do. I want to make sure everybody has the resources which are why I do the show, the resources and understand that if you had birth trauma surrounding your own birth or the birth of your children. Unfortunately it’s very normal today, I can tell you as a practitioner as a doctor that I’ve had post-traumatic stress disorder. I can tell you what it’s like to be in those situations that you’re talking about, I can go back to medical school and remember a particularly traumatic birth where a baby died that had been there, it was a big deal everybody was running and everything like that and then I remember afterwards the resident who was above me saying, oh my God now we’re all going to be sued.

So there was the trauma of that and then the rest of us walked around with fear and wonder, oh my God is my name on that chart because if my name is on that chart now I’m getting sued over what just happened. And I got to say everybody was running around doing their best to not have a bad outcome, to not have the bad outcome. You got to say they’re doctors their whole thing is they want everybody to have a beautiful baby.

All the nurses like when you were OBGYN, your goal was for everybody to have a beautiful baby, but when stuff goes wrong it’s hysterical and then everybody walks away doesn’t talk about it and goes on to the next thing. So the practitioners have a lot of trauma that they’ve dealt with, so I could tell you all the doctors I know have post-traumatic stress disorder from something that happened to them during their career that was particularly traumatic and then not only did the person have trauma they felt responsible for it and then you wait for the lawyers letter to come.

Anne: Yeah, yeah absolutely and I wanted to just also give your readers a gift, it’s on homesweethomebirth.com/gift where you can download 154 of my favorite books resources which include books like Healing from Birth Trauma. It’s inspirational books for women, for dads, for moms, for pregnant women for you know, living in joy but it’s also I have some definite resources on there about healing from birth trauma.

Dr. Veronica: Yes, well thank you so much and homesweethomebirth.com. I want everybody to go check it out because you will get a lot a resources there and then you might decide you want to move where Anne is so you can have your baby.

Anne: No, no but there are breath workers around the world and if you can I do Skype sessions which are also very powerful, but other breath workers do Skype sessions as well. Don’t not do it if you’re really suffering, it’s the most effective modality I have personally experienced and witnessed in hundreds of thousands of people.

Dr. Veronica: Thank you so much Anne, I really appreciate to interview and thank you so much for your work.

Anne: Thank you for your work.

Female VO: Thank you for listening to the Wellness Revolution Podcast. If you want to hear more on how to bring wellness into your life, visit DrVeronica.com. See you all next week, take care.

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Dr. Veronica Anderson is an MD, Functional Medicine Practitioner, Homeopath. and Medical Intuitive. As a national speaker and designer of the Functional Fix and Rejuvenation Journey programs, she helps people who feel like their doctors have failed them. She advocates science-based natural, holistic, and complementary treatments to address the root cause of disease. Dr. Veronica is a highly-sought guest on national television and syndicated radio and hosts her own radio show, Wellness for the REAL World, on FOX Sports 920 AM “the Jersey” on Mondays at 7:00 pm ET.